


the sound of your feet upon the ground

by glorious_spoon



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Post-Canon, Resurrection, eventually, like very loosely inspired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27239275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: There’s an odd lurching sensation in the back of his mind, half remembered: as if some vast piece of machinery is gearing up. He had the same feeling when they first met Ben, and then Bev and Mike; when they built the clubhouse; when they stepped through the door of the house on 29 Neibolt Street. A sense of inevitability, of the world bending itself to some unseen will.Or: after everything, Richie goes back into the tunnels to bring Eddie home.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, The Losers Club & Richie Tozier
Comments: 74
Kudos: 237





	1. You can't be careful on a skateboard, mister.

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly a movie-verse fic, but some bits of the universe (like Ben's silver coins, and the werewolf story) are drawn from the book canon.

Richie is expecting one of them to corner him at the Town House before they all head out for the airport—or the bus station, in Mike’s case, because he’s the kind terminally _fucked in the head_ nerd who thinks that a ten-hour road trip via Greyhound sounds like a stellar start to a new life—but he was banking on it being Beverly.

Bev would have been easier. They’ve shared blood and cigarettes and secrets and dances that they both wanted to be with someone else, and they never had to fucking _talk_ about any of it. Bev is sharp and Bev is deadly, but Bev also has the same problems with sincerity that Richie does.

He could have handled Bev.

Instead, it’s Ben sidling up to the bar next to him, leaning over to pull out a bottle of top-shelf bourbon and a pair of glasses. There’s no bartender to stop him. Richie still isn’t completely convinced that anyone actually works here at all.

“Can I tempt you?” he says, and splashes a generous measure into both glasses without waiting for an answer.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not cultured enough to appreciate this properly,” Richie says, but he takes the glass anyway.

Ben’s smile is the one thing about him that hasn’t changed in the decades since Richie saw him last: sweet and unguarded, like somehow he’s managed to walk skinless through the world into his forties without getting maimed. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“Cool. So, what, is this my intervention? Because I feel like traditionally those involve less booze.”

“It’s not an intervention.”

“Uh huh.” Richie tries the whiskey. It’s pretty good. “Did you guys draw straws?”

Ben smiles again. “I volunteered.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Richie.”

Yeah, letting Ben take care of this was probably the smart bet. Richie could have told any of the rest of them to fuck off, but he can’t do that to Ben. It would be like kicking a puppy. A tall, handsome puppy with the upper-body strength to haul one distraught comedian out of a collapsing house against his will, but still. He pushes the whiskey back to fold his arms on the bar top, then rests his head on them so that he doesn’t have to look at Ben’s earnest face anymore.

“What?” he says into the cradle of his elbows. His glasses press uncomfortably into the bridge of his nose.

“I’m not going to try to stop you. None of us are.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Richie lies.

Ben sighs, then settles a hand on his shoulder. Squeezes warm and tight through the layers of cloth. “Come on, Rich. Sit up and have a drink with me.”

There’s a clinking noise as the glass is pushed across the bar top. Richie lifts his head, pushing his glasses up to rub at his eyes. They’re dry. He hasn’t been able to cry since the quarry. He’s not sure if he’ll ever be able to cry again, but his eyes still ache, parched and burning like he’s been standing in smoke. He takes the glass, stares down into its amber depths, then finally takes another drink.

“Why the fuck are you still here, anyway?” he says into his glass. “Don’t you and Bev have a love shack somewhere to get movin’ and groovin’ to?”

“It can wait,” Ben says. He fiddles with his glass; Richie can see light reflecting on it as it spins in his big hands. Capable-looking hands, to go with his whole effortlessly sexy L.L. Bean model vibe. Finally, he heaves another sigh, takes another drink, and says, very gently, “You were in love with him, weren’t you?”

“Fuck you,” Richie says automatically.

“Rich—”

“No, I’m serious.” He shoves his seat back so hard that it falls over and nearly takes him with it before he catches himself on the edge of the bar. “Fuck. You.”

His hands are shaking, his heart racing. He’s not sure if it’s panic or fury or some poisonous mixture of both, but if he doesn’t get out of here right now he’s going to either puke on Ben or take a swing at him.

He kicks the bar stool out of the way as he stumbles backward, and it’s only then that he finally looks back at Ben, who is standing with his hands up, his eyes wide and apologetic. It’s like there’s an overlay all of a sudden, a kind of double vision: on the one hand, the rangy, handsome man in front of him; on the other, the chubby boy they found bleeding and terrified outside the Barrens in the summer of 1989. The boy who went into Neibolt because It had Beverly, because Beverly was down in the tunnels and Ben loved her with all his heart even if she’d never love him back.

Lovesick fools recognize each other, although Ben was always sweeter about it than Richie ever managed to be. No wonder he got the girl in the end.

“Shit,” Richie sighs, losing his grip on that monstrous fury all at once. It drains away, leaving only a hollow ache behind. “Sorry, man.”

“Don’t worry about it. I mean it,” Ben adds quickly, when Richie starts to open his mouth. “ _I’m_ sorry, I shouldn’t have… I didn’t come down here to give you a hard time, or to make you talk about it, or—look, just. Here.”

He digs in his pocket, and comes up with something gleaming that he holds in his hand for a moment, like he’s testing its weight. Three somethings, Richie realizes with an odd chill: cartwheel silver dollars like tiny moons in his broad palm.

“Didn’t—there were more of those, weren’t there? They were your dad’s.” Richie’s voice saws at his throat. “And we melted two of them down—”

“—to make silver bullets. Yeah.” Ben takes a deep breath, then says, “When Mike called me, I went down to a bar and got shitfaced drunk. Stupid drunk. I took these for some reason—I think I had some idea about giving them to my bartender, for his kids, but that never happened. They ended up in my bag instead, when I came here. I found them this morning.”

“Oh,” Richie says quietly. There’s an odd lurching sensation in the back of his mind, half remembered: as if some vast piece of machinery is gearing up. He had the same feeling when they first met Ben, and then Bev and Mike; when they built the clubhouse; when they stepped through the door of the house on 29 Neibolt Street. A sense of inevitability, of the world bending itself to some unseen will.

“I want you to have them. I think—I think they might come in handy. That’s all.”

Richie swallows something that feels jagged in his throat. He holds out his hand and lets Ben drop the skin-warm coins into it, then pulls him into a quick hard hug. Ben startles slightly, his arms lifting in an abortive flail before he wraps them around Richie and hugs back just as hard.

“Good luck,” he murmurs into Richie’s shoulder.

Richie squeezes his eyes shut and nods, then lets Ben go.

* * *

It’s already sweltering this time of year in L.A., but when Richie steps outside the Town House, it’s windy and crisp enough that he actually needs the jacket he threw on. It’s a new one. His beloved leather jacket is so caked with sewer slime and blood spatter that it’s probably unsalvageable. It’s still up in his room; he hasn’t been able to bring himself to throw it out for reasons that are pretty much completely unrelated to the fact that it’s his favorite. He already had one hysterical breakdown in the shower that first night, scrubbing the blood off and watching it swirl away down the drain and disappear. He’s not looking for another one.

He squints up at the sky, which is a clear and eye-watering shade of blue, then glances over at Mike, who is sitting on a low bench near the entrance with his long legs kicked out and a peaceful expression on his face. He hasn’t acknowledged Richie’s presence in any way, but Richie knows he’s aware of it.

“Were you waiting for me or something?” he asks, shoving his hands into his pockets. Ben’s coins are on the left side, bumping his knuckles.

“I was waiting for Bill, actually,” Mike says, but he shifts over on the bench to give Richie room to sit down. “How are you, Rich?”

“Me? Oh, I’m peachy. I’m great. How about you, Mikey? You ready to bust out of here?”

Mike shrugs. “To be honest with you, I’m not sure. It’s been…” he trails off and sighs. “I do have a life here.”

“You literally live in a fuckin’ attic.”

“Well, I’m definitely done with that,” Mike says dryly. “Let’s just say that the board wasn’t too thrilled with how everything went down with Bowers. I’ve been very politely given my walking papers.”

Richie grimaces. He spent a deeply unpleasant evening a few days ago down at the sheriff’s office being interrogated about his part in Bowers’ timely demise. In another town, the whole thing would probably have dragged out into some protracted legal bullshit that would definitely ruin whatever’s left of his career even if it didn’t land him in state prison, but—this is Derry.

This is fucking Derry, and nobody gives a shit.

“On what planet was that _your_ fault?” he asks.

“This is Derry,” Mike says in an eerie echo of Richie’s thoughts. There’s no real bitterness in his voice. Mike isn’t the type to get bitter about things even when he’s got a damn good reason to, which is probably the only way he’s survived this godforsaken town for the past twenty-seven years. “Anyway, at least they didn’t fire me. I’m taking a leave of absence. I have a lot of vacation time saved up, and Carol can keep the lights on for a month or so without me. After that… I guess we’ll see.”

Richie nods. He doesn’t really get it, but that’s Mike for you. He can be a surprisingly reckless guy under his zen exterior, but not about shit like this. He saves that exclusively for fighting alien demon clowns, which is hopefully something they’ll never, ever have to do again. “Please tell me you’re finally going to Florida.”

“To start with,” Mike says. He’s smiling a little, soft and faraway, just like he did talking about it as a kid. Richie knows that he’s been stuck here for the past few decades, but he hopes, suddenly, that Mike’s at least been able to take a fucking vacation in that time. See the ocean or something.

He doesn’t ask, though. If the answer is _no_ , that’ll be too depressing for words, and Richie is plenty fucking depressed already. Instead he kicks his feet out and tilts his head back toward the cloudless sky. “Sun and surf, man. Have fun.”

“Thanks. I’ll try.”

They sit there together in companionable silence until Bill shows up. Richie had assumed, like a reasonable adult, that he’d be driving his fancy goddamn rental car, but instead he’s riding Silver, standing up on the pedals with his graying hair flying back in the breeze as he coasts into the parking lot. The old behemoth of a bike fits him better now than it did as a kid, but he still looks patently fucking absurd. Richie snorts, but he can’t quite make a smile happen. He’s been having some trouble with that in the past week.

Mike glances over at him, then lifts a hand as Bill brakes in front of them and clamors off the bike. “Nice ride?”

“I’m a little out of shape for it, I think,” Bill admits, smiling ruefully. “Hey, Rich.”

“Hey,” Richie says, shoving his hands back into his pockets and slumping on the bench as Mike stands to give Bill a hug, complete with manly back-slapping. They pull apart, and then Bill is looking at Richie, who slumps a little more under the full weight of his attention, then stands up abruptly. “Well, you crazy kids have fun. I’m outta here. I’ve got shit to do.”

Bill exchanges a glance with Mike, then says, “You okay?”

“What the fuck do you think?” Richie says. Before Bill can answer, he adds, “I’d be a hell of a lot better if people would stop fucking asking me that, okay?”

“Sorry,” Bill says instead of snapping back like Richie was half-hoping he would. He steps forward and reaches up to squeeze Richie's shoulder solemnly. It will never stop being weird that Big Bill, who always seemed to loom so large when they were kids, ended up being the shortest of all of them. He’s still got the presence, though. That effortless charisma that could get a person to follow him straight down into hell, which Richie knows because he’s done more or less exactly that. Twice.

He’s expecting some kind of sincere uplifting bullshit that he’ll be obligated to make a snide joke about, but instead Bill just gives him a long look, then nods to himself and says, “I think you should take S-silver.”

“What?”

Bill lets go of his shoulder and goes back over to the old bike. He toes the kickstand back up and pushes it at Richie, then lets go so that Richie has to catch it to keep it from smashing his shins. It has a weight to it, even though it seems so much smaller than when they were kids.

“First Ben, now you guys,” he says. “This is starting to feel like a Viking funeral.”

“I think it’s more…” Bill trails off, then shakes his head, a slight pinch between his brows. “It’s more like a s-story, isn’t it? Like Orpheus and Eurydice.”

“Only gay,” Richie says flatly, and knuckles his forehead at the look on Bill’s face. Ben might be the only one who’s said it out loud, but they all must have guessed by now. “Don’t, just—forget it. Anyway, it’s been like twenty years since I dropped out of college, but if I remember my World Mythology course right, that one doesn’t end too well.”

"Well," Bill says. "Then y-you know what n-n-not to do."

His stutter has been mostly gone since they left Neibolt for the last time. It's a comfort, in some way that Richie can't put a finger on, to hear it now.

“We can come with you,” Mike says quietly. “None of us wanted to leave him.”

“See, I knew you guys were plotting behind my back,” Richie says, and squeezes his eyes shut at the sympathetic expressions on both their faces. “No, I actually think this is something I have to do. Just me.”

Stories have power; they all know that. _Belief_ has power, and Richie was the only one who refused to believe that it was a corpse they were leaving behind in the collapsing cavern. They all know that, too. In another place, that wouldn’t mean anything, but Derry has its own magic. Headless boys and giant birds and bloody sinks and pictures that moved when they shouldn’t. Paul Bunyan’s gruesome plastic smile and werewolves that could be killed by silver bullets and the power of belief.

It’s ugly, messy, hurtful magic, but Richie will take what he can get.

They don’t argue. Instead, they step up to hug him, one after the other. Mike knocks his forehead against Richie’s, tall enough that he has to tilt his head down to do it; Bill, who quit his growing at fifteen, tucks himself under Richie’s shoulder and squeezes until his ribs creak.

He hesitates when he lets go, though. “Look, Rich, just be c-c-care—”

“Thanks for the bike, Big Bill,” Richie interrupts. “I got this.”

Bill smiles a little, wryly, shakes his head, and lets it go. They all know that _careful_ isn’t going to do Richie any good here.

* * *

He’s the right size for it, but Silver isn’t adjusted for his height and he feels nine kinds of ridiculous pedaling down the street on it, wobbly and uneven until his muscle memory finally kicks in. He can’t even remember the last time he was on a bike, but it’s been years. L.A. is a city of cars, and Richie is a long way removed from that kid who liked to ride with no hands and race Bill down Kansas Street until they were going so fast at the bottom of the hill that they could get airborne on the next bump if they timed it right. Pedaling crazily in Silver’s wake and screaming into the wind while the rest of their friends followed at slightly more sane speeds.

_You guys are gonna fucking end up in traction—do you know how many people are paralyzed every year in bike accidents? It’s a lot, okay, I’m just saying. My mom’s friend, she was reading this article last week that said—_

He shakes his head sharply, casting aside the memory of that quick, breathless voice, and pedals faster, putting on speed as he crests the top of Up-Mile Hill. The muscles in his legs are already burning from the unaccustomed strain. It’s a straight slope down, the Barrens sprawling out to his right, the wet stink of the canal; to his left, the snarled tangle of downtown streets, familiar houses, corner stores. The street is oil-stained and empty.

Bill used to hit breakneck speeds down this hill as a kid, dodging traffic and whooping with a wild abandon that was, in retrospect, probably at least a little bit suicidal. Like so much of the shit Bill pulled back then.

Richie doesn’t try to push it, but he doesn’t really need to. The bike puts on speed without any input from him, just tires and pavement and gravity, the crisp breeze whipping his face. He opens his mouth to taste it and feels an echo—just an echo—of that fearless childhood euphoria.

There’s a familiar redheaded figure outside the minimart at the bottom of the hill. Richie brakes, has a bad moment when he thinks he’s about to go tumbling ass over teakettle in the street, and then wrestles the bike under control and brings it to a stop next to the spot where Beverly is sitting with her feet tucked under her, smoking contemplatively. She waves at him with the hand holding the cigarette, trailing smoke through the air. Richie gives her an incredulous look, then props the bike against a nearby fire hydrant and folds himself gracelessly down onto the curb next to her. She holds out the cigarette; he takes a drag from it, wincing at the sharp menthol aftertaste.

“Take it,” Bev says. “I have more.”

“I fucking hate Newports,” Richie says, but he takes the cigarette anyway. “What is this, college?”

Bev digs a mostly-full pack out of her pocket, pulls out another cigarette, and lights it with a match from the pack bearing the garish logo of the minimart behind them. “Probably the last time I smoked one. Tom—” she breaks off, then gives him a very brittle smile. “Tom didn’t like it.”

Riche nods, holding his cigarette out to watch smoke twine up in lazy spirals before dissipating in the breeze. He doesn’t really need to ask. He saw the bruises on her wrists, the pale band where her ring was. He can guess the rest.

“Look,” he says, “I don't want to overstep or anything, but it would be an honor to take a baseball bat to that dude’s head. Just say the word.”

“I already broke a picture frame across his face. It was cathartic, actually. Isn't that awful?”

“You're asking the wrong person. I hope you made him bleed.”

Bev laughs shakily. “Like a stuck pig.”

Richie holds out a hand for her to slap, and she does, and they finish their cigarettes together in silence. Bev stubs hers out on the greasy pavement and goes to drop the butt into a nearby garbage can. Richie, who was about to toss his into the street, guiltily gets up to do the same.

“So, what’s your contribution to this shitshow?” he asks, leaning his shoulder against the brick wall of the minimart. He can hear the low staticky hum of the neon beer signs. There’s a faint stench of garbage from the overflowing dumpster around the side of the building that almost has him craving another cigarette just to get the smell out of his nose. Or maybe that’s the anxiety. His hands are shaking; he shoves them into the pockets of his jacket, feeling the warm shapes of Ben’s coins against his knuckles.

Bev smiles slightly. “If I say I don’t know what you’re talking about…?”

“Well, sweetheart, I’d hate to have to call you a liar to your face,” Richie says in a film-noir Voice that might be a distant cousin to the Bogart impression he tortured them all with throughout middle school.

“You’re such an asshole,” Bev says fondly.

“I can always count on you to call ‘em like you see ‘em,” Richie says, dropping the Voice. “Thanks, Marsh.”

“Anytime, Trashmouth.”

Richie blows out a long sigh, looking out across Kansas Street to where the land drops away past the guardrail, the wild green sprawl of the Barrens stretching out beyond. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I was fucking—I think I was going to Neibolt Street, how fucked up is that?”

“This is all pretty fucked up,” Bev says, digging out another cigarette.

The bell on the door chimes as it swings open, spilling a gaggle of kids out onto the step. One lanky boy has his arms loaded with soda bottles and another kid is carrying two giant bags of chips and a package of red Twizzlers. A small girl with a blonde undercut is playing a video clip on her phone and they’re all laughing, chattering a mile a minute in the incomprehensible private language of teenagers. They pass by within arms’ reach of Richie and Bev but take no notice of them: just a couple of adult-shaped shadows on the landscape.

Richie watches them wander up the hill toward the long-abandoned baseball diamond past where Tracker Brothers used to be, then scrapes a hand over his face. For some insane reason, _now_ he suddenly feels like he might cry.

“I miss them too,” Bev says softly. When he glances at her, she’s looking out at the Barrens, her profile drawn sharp in the afternoon sunlight, her expression unreadable. “I missed all of you even when I didn’t remember you. And now…”

“Yeah,” Richie says roughly, a beat too late.

Bev sighs out smoke into the breeze. “I don’t have anything to give you.”

“Aw, don’t leave me hangin’ here, darlin’, you’re a-breakin’ my heart.”

She doesn’t take the bait. “I know Ben was going to give you the coins. He talked to me about it. And you have Silver.” She nods to the bike. “And I stopped here to get cigarettes, and somehow I knew you’d be coming and I should wait. But I don’t have anything for you. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

Fucking Derry. Even with the clown gone, it’s still worming cold, meddling fingers into their heads.

“I hate this town,” Richie sighs. The worst part is, he knows he could leave now if he wanted to. Just… walk away. Just leave—

( _eddie_ )

—everything behind and walk away.

Bev nods, her eyes closed.

“Have you been having dreams? Since, I mean—” he gestures vaguely, like she can see him.

She takes a sharp breath, then says, softly, “Yeah.”

“I thought I was cracking up,” Richie says honestly. He’s still not entirely convinced he’s not, although the fact that the rest of them have been going along with all this is at least a little reassuring on that count. “It’s like in the deadlights, right? Like that—”

He breaks off again. He’d never be able to describe that vast otherspace, the unspeakable pulsing light of It’s true form. Fortunately—or unfortunately, for her—Bev is the one person he doesn’t have to explain it to. She’s seen it too. Seen more of it than he did, thanks to the timely intervention of a well-thrown fence post.

“Yeah,” she says again. “But now there’s something…”

“Something else,” Richie finishes, nodding stupidly. Some titanic living _thing_ floating in the blackness, so enormous that it’s rendered incomprehensible, describable only in pieces: the greenish-brown curve of a shell like the foothills of a mountain range, a vast, lidless, liquid eye.

“Don’t go to Neibolt,” Bev says abruptly, in an odd, flat tone that makes Richie glance over at her, suddenly chilled. “That way is shut.”

“Bev?” he asks carefully. He lifts a hand to touch her shoulder, then lets it drop; she flinches like he touched her anyway, then shakes her head violently. “Hey there. You good?”

“Yeah,” she says, sounding dazed. “I spaced out for a second there. I’m sorry.”

“No problemo,” Richie says, rubbing his hands over his arms. He’s got goosebumps, even with the jacket. “Hey, look, I’m gonna get going. You look after Haystack, huh? Somebody needs to.”

Bev nods, then loops one arm around him to hug him tight before releasing him abruptly. Richie grabs her wrist to take a drag on her cigarette, blows a smoke-ring at her like they’re still fifteen and sneaking smokes behind the gym, and then pulls away.

It’s not until he’s hauling Silver upright and swinging a leg over the old bike that she calls his name. “Hey, Rich. Just—make sure you come back, okay?”

Richie sketches a half-serious salute. “You got it, Red,” he says, then kicks off and lets the pavement sweep him away down the hill.

* * *

He doesn’t go to Neibolt. The old house and the tunnels underneath are crushed into a pile of rubble, and he fucking _knows_ that because he watched it happen.

 _That way is shut_ , he thinks, and even though he’s starting to get warm from exertion, a cold shiver goes through him. He’s dealt with enough destiny-adjacent bullshit in his life to recognize it when he hears it.

The old path down into the Barrens is still there, still in the same place as it was in 1989, and probably for decades before that: a narrow hard-packed dirt trail winding down a gentler part of the slope past the guardrail, there for every generation of kids to find and claim as their own.

He’s not about to test out his rusty biking skills off-roading on an ancient Schwinn with bald tires, but he also can’t bring himself to leave Silver behind, so he pushes it down the bumpy path, ducking under tree branches that seem to hang so much lower than when he was a kid until the trail spits him out onto a broad green field. The grass is grown high enough to tangle in the spokes and catch him up a few times before he finally makes it down to the yawning mouth of the storm drain. Water echoes eerily through the hollow dark space. The ceiling is so high that even now he doesn’t need to duck to fit inside. The water is barely deep enough to soak his sneakers, but it still reeks with decades of graywater runoff and damp rot. The rocks are slick with wet moss, and about ten yards in he loses his balance when the floor starts to tilt upward and goes down hard on his hands and knees, dropping the bike with a clatter and a splash.

He stays like that in the cold silty mud, his knees throbbing and his jeans soaked through, for a long moment before heaving himself back up to his feet.

“This is bullshit,” he says out loud. It echoes slightly in the dank cavernous space, his voice multiplying and distorting. “ _Such_ fucking bullshit.”

It never should have been him. This kind of hero’s-quest bullshit was always more Bill’s wheelhouse: Big Bill with his courage and his steely resolve, or Mike with his steady patience. Ben, the gentle romantic, or fierce, fearless Beverly. Not Richie. Not some sad clown of a closeted asshole who tried to run away the minute shit got real and would probably choke if he tried to express a sincere emotion out loud.

 _Then go back_ , something whispers. It’s in his head, but he still flinches at the cold, gleeful, warbling tones. Even long after he forgot Derry for the first time, the cruelest part of his subconscious always spoke to him in Pennywise’s voice. _Turn around, go back. Get in your car and just drive on out of here. Put some rock n’ roll on the radio and have a good cry, and see if you can manage to forget again. You’re not cut out for this, and we both know it._

_Truth or dare, Richie. But you never did like the truth, did you?_

“Fuck you,” Richie says under his breath. It comes out thin and ragged, so he heaves in a breath, then yells, “Fuck _you!_ ”

It comes back to him with a mocking echo, but he feels better for it all the same. He lifts Silver out of the water, props the old bike against the damp, crumbling concrete wall, and starts forward on foot into the darkness.


	2. Out of the blue and into the black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional content warning in this chapter for canon-typical gore (though there's no on-screen violence) and one instance of Henry Bowers-typical homophobic language.

1983

When he was seven years old, Richie got lost in the giant corn maze that McKennett Farms set up every October on the highway outside of town. The maze was a Derry fixture, a massive undertaking that spanned the better part of three acres and took most of a month to complete. Around the middle of September, high school students could pick up some after-school pocket money by hacking down the hardy corn stalks and spreading mulch on the resultant paths. Jerry McKennett designed a new one every year; it was as much a hobby as anything for the old man, who was happy if it made enough money to break even.

Richie was generally indifferent to the hay rides and watery hot cider that made up the rest of Derry’s pre-Halloween festivities, but he _loved_ the corn maze. Later, much later, he’d think that it was a lucky thing for him that Pennywise wouldn’t wake for another six years, by which time old Jerry McKennett would be three years in the ground and the farm portioned up and sold off by his sons, who had no interest in staying in Derry to nurse the struggling family business along. That maze, with its long twisting paths that could easily carry a child out of earshot, would have been prime hunting territory. A good place for lost little boys to vanish into a monster’s jaws.

That was six years away, though. On this particular brisk, gloomy day in October of 1983, he bounced impatiently on his heels while his mom handed over a couple of dollars to the bored teenager in a sagging witch hat at the entrance, his cold fingers tucked into the pockets of his jacket because he’d forgotten his gloves.

“Are you boys sure you’ll be okay on your own?” she asked, and he rolled his eyes, exchanging an exasperated glance with Eddie, who was swaddled up in so many layers that he looked like a walking blanket fort. The bobble on his hat wobbled in the breeze. His cheeks were pink and round and Richie wanted desperately to pinch them.

“Mom, come on, I’m not a _baby_.”

“You’re _my_ baby,” she said, automatically, but he could see her eyeing the farmer’s market spread across the broad lawn to their left, and he knew she was weakening. “Okay, but remember to stick together, okay?”

“Yes, we will, I promise, _geeze—_ ”

“Watch the attitude, mister.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Tozier,” Eddie said politely, and Richie rolled his eyes again.

“Yeah, okay, _thank you_ , let’s go, Eds.”

“ _Don’t_ call me Eds,” Eddie said crossly, but he let Richie grab him by one gloved hand and drag him into the maze.

The thing was, he had really _meant_ to stick close to Eddie. But Richie would never really master the art of patience, and after five minutes of wandering slowly through the twisting paths, he yelled, “Let’s race, let’s _race_ , come on!” and took off without checking to see if Eddie was following.

He could hear him, squeaking and panting in his too-heavy winter coat, and he grinned into the chilly breeze as he rounded a corner, picking up speed. He was taller than Eddie. He could almost always beat him in a race, and Eddie was weighed down by all those layers too, because his mom was always so afraid he’d catch a cold.

Richie had good lungs and strong legs and a child’s irrepressible energy, and it was a while before he finally stumbled to a halt in a dead end, breathless and laughing and waiting for the _squeak-squeak-squeak_ of Eddie pursuing him. But he couldn’t hear anything.

“Eds?” Richie called, ducking back out of the dead end and looking both ways. The corn towered over his head, all browned and clacking in the breeze, and the gray sky overhead was roiled with low-hanging, fast-moving clouds. There was no sign of Eddie. More worrying, Richie suddenly couldn’t remember which direction he’d come from. The brown mulch paths all looked the same. “Eddie, come on, I’m sorry.”

Still no response. A needle of cold went through him, and he turned back, jogging in the direction he _thought_ he’d come from. His legs were starting to ache, and it didn’t seem like so much fun anymore.

It seemed a lot less fun ten minutes later when he still hadn’t found Eddie, or the entrance to the maze, or anything else. It was a chilly day and there weren’t that many people out; every once in a while, he would hear other voices—grownup voices, sometimes—carried on the breeze, but he could never tell where they were coming from. He tried going off the path once, pushing through the close-spaced corn stalks, and wound up nearly trapped in the spindly forest of them before he managed to tear through to a different empty path. His breath was coming hard in his throat even though he wasn’t running. He felt like he was going to cry.

He wasn’t going to cry; he wasn’t a _baby_ , he wasn’t going to cry.

His sneaker caught a broken-off stalk sticking up out of the mulch. He went down hard on his knees in the path, and there were tears welling up in his eyes all of a sudden, big stupid babyish tears. Richie sat back on his butt and swiped at them with his cold hands, but more of them kept coming, and he was never going to find Eddie, he was never going to get out of here, he’d never see his mom again and it would get dark and something horrible would come out of the corn and chase him and there would be no one _there_ to help, and—

“Richie?”

Richie spun around, grinding mulch into the seat of his pants, to find Eddie at the far end of the path, staring at him. He’d lost his hat, and his hair was all over the place, his coat hanging open to reveal the top layer of sweaters he was wearing underneath. His cheeks were pink. He was smiling.

“There you are,” he said.

Richie promptly burst into noisy tears.

“Woah, woah,” Eddie said, sounding shocked, and scrambled to him. “Don’t cry, Richie, don’t cry, did you fall down? Did you hurt yourself? I have bandaids in my pocket—”

“I’m n-n-not crying,” Richie sobbed, but when Eddie plopped down next to him he wrapped both arms around him, rubbing his snotty face into Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie didn’t even try to shove him off. “Shut up. Don’t tell anybody.”

“I won’t tell anybody,” Eddie promised seriously. “Do you need a bandaid?”

“No. I was just—I was just—” he pulled away, horribly embarrassed now. “I got lost.”

“Oh,” Eddie said. He patted Richie’s hair carefully with one gloved hand. “It’s okay. I know where we are.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.” Eddie squinted down the path, then clambered to his feet, offering Richie a hand up as well. “If we go that way, and then down the big one on the left, we can get back to the start.”

“How do you know?”

Eddie shrugged. “I don’t know. I just do. That way’s north—” he pointed; “—and the start of the maze is west. Or, like, north-west. The big path loops around, it’ll take us back.”

“But how can you _tell_?” Richie asked.

Eddie shrugged again. He was still holding Richie’s hand, and his gloved fingers were warm. “I just can. Come on. I would have found you sooner if you weren’t running around the whole time. Don’t you know you’re supposed to stay in one place if you’re—”

* * *

_—lost?_

* * *

The sewer pipe doesn’t turn much, but the light from the mouth fades quickly enough to make Richie glad of the flashlight he thought to throw in his backpack. The beam of light bounces crazily off the walls as he hikes, illuminating crumbling concrete and moss and garbage, and not much else. He’s not sure how far in it goes before it branches. He should have brought a map, probably, although he remembers Bill’s dad saying—back before Georgie died, when he still talked to Bill, and by extension the rest of them—that some massive stack of blueprints had gone missing back in the 60’s, and nobody really knew where half of the tunnels went. A person could wander for days without ever circling back to the start. Even without the sewer clown wandering around eating people, it would be easy to die down here.

Richie shoves away that morbid thought as he comes upon the first fork. He’s pretty sure he wants to keep going left if he’s headed in the general direction of Neibolt, but not a hundred percent. He’s mostly running on instinct here, following the vague nudges that he sure fucking _hopes_ are coming from somewhere other than the inside of his own head, given that Richie is the kind of person who can still get lost in the city where he’s lived for fifteen years.

“Could really use you and your freaky sense of direction right now, Eds,” he murmurs, then swipes a hand over his mouth before it can make a weird, wobbly smile.

Saying Eddie’s name out loud still feels like screaming, like something jagged that tears his throat raw on the way out. Even thinking about him hurts. He can’t remember Eddie at seven, smiling triumphantly as he led them out of the corn maze, without thinking of Eddie at forty, bleeding out in a sewer. Even with the decades-long gap in the middle, every memory seems strung together in a tightly knotted web around his heart. It hurts to pull on it.

 _Stop_ , he tells himself in a stern, authoritative Voice that might be Big Bill’s, or possibly his dad’s. He’d be able to tell if he said it out loud—the Voices always find their real identity in his mouth, not in his head—but he doesn’t.

“Fuck it,” he says instead. The left-hand tunnel slopes vaguely downward, and there’s an unpleasant smell coming from it, which probably means it’s the right way. At least it smells more like mildew and dry rot than raw sewage. Small blessings. “Left it is.”

He glances back toward the vague impression of sunlight still coming in through the distant entrance, then lifts his flashlight and starts down the left-hand tunnel.

He takes another left a few hundred yards later, and another, and then, randomly, a right turn, zigzagging deeper into the darkness, following the gradual downward slope of the pipes. The smell of mildew and rot has faded entirely, and after the first few hundred yards the floors are dry, although the curvature of the massive concrete pipes still makes his footing uncertain. After the third fork the ceiling is low enough that he has to duck his head as he walks. He can feel the dry trickle of silt down the back of his collar every time he forgets and bumps the grimy ceiling. _Hopefully_ it’s just dirt, and not fucking—cave spiders or something.

 _We’re not afraid of fucking spiders,_ he thinks, and then laughs out loud, dry and raw and strangely muffled in the close darkness. It’s like he can suddenly feel the tons of dirt pressing down upon him; he’s been walking on a vaguely downward slope for at least half an hour now, and he must be well under Derry. That, or he’s been going in circles.

He doesn’t think so, though. There’s a strange quality to the air now, a cold metallic bite even though the temperature hasn’t really changed. It doesn’t smell like the clown’s lair—that had been the putrid animal reek of blood and rotting meat, and this is just… cold. There’s a similar quality to it all the same, though. Something deadened. Something _dead._

As soon as he has _that_ pleasant thought, the tunnel starts to widen. He goes from walking hunched over to keep his head from bumping the ceiling with every step to not even being able to reach the ceiling at all. And then suddenly there’s no ceiling; no walls either. The beam of his flashlight dissipates into the distant blackness without ever hitting anything.

Richie takes a deep breath. That cold metallic smell is stronger now, and he can hear something that sounds like water. Not a distant trickle dripping slowly through caverns; this sounds almost like the beach. Like waves on a shore.

That’s exactly what it is, he realizes a moment later. The floor slopes gently down toward a broad beach clothed in black sand that glitters in the beam of his flashlight. Beyond is just water, endless and dark. It breaks upon the shallow shore, but out in the distance it’s as smooth as black glass as far as his light reaches.

It’s like standing on the shore of the ocean at night, staring out into the black. The vastness of it is incomprehensible.

Richie takes in a shuddering breath, feeling the weight of the flashlight tremble in his hand, sending the light juddering across the sand and the water. He turns back toward where he came from, but he can’t see the mouth of the tunnel. He’s standing on crumbling concrete dusted with black sand, and there’s no sign of a way back.

He’s not in the Derry sewer system anymore. Or even underneath it. This is something else. Some _where_ else.

 _Out of the blue and into the black_ , he thinks with a strange, heavy chill. For the first time since he walked into the sewers, dread rises up to choke him. He’s been wandering around in the darkness for hours, all alone with no map and no weapons, nothing but a dollar-store flashlight and his own thoughts and Voices to keep him company, and somehow, this is the first time it’s really occurred to him to be afraid.

From across the water, something starts splashing toward shore. Richie spins toward the sound, queasy fear opening up a yawning pit in his stomach. He’s suddenly certain that it’ll be the clown or something worse, some spidery slithering monstrous horror coming for him out of the darkness.

Instead, it’s a raft. A rough-hewn raft bound together with twine, the ragged ends of the split logs lifting the water in fine sprays that glitter where they catch the light. A slumped figure stands at the far end, heaving a long pole to propel it toward the shore. He’s lit up like a phantom in the beam from Richie’s flashlight, his face obscured by the glare.

The raft beaches, maybe ten yards from him. The man slams his pole down into the sand like a harpoon, like he’s stabbing something that’s still alive and squirming, and then he hops down into the shallows and finally meets Richie’s eyes.

Henry Bowers didn’t age well.

Richie was aware of that in a vague kind of way the first time around, but he was a little fucking distracted by all of the attempted murder, and then by the sickening _crack_ as the axe sank into Bowers’ skull. He really didn’t _want_ to get a good look after that, but he remembers a deputy sliding a mugshot across the table for him to look at; remembers taking it and thinking, _Jesus, he got old._

Death hasn’t improved him any. There’s an ugly grin on his sallow face as he splashes up to the shore. He’s still wearing the hospital scrubs he had on when he died, the hems soaked nearly to the knee, and his eyes are glittering with malice.

“Richie fucking Tozier,” he says.

Richie tightens his grip on the flimsy plastic flashlight, wishing it was the handle of a baseball bat. Or a fucking axe. “You’re dead. I killed you.”

Bowers cackles, tilting his head just enough to display the bloody mess at the back of his skull, where it’s caved in and spilling gore into his scraggly mullet. “Sure did. Why do you think I’m down here?”

He starts forward again, and Richie flinches back before he can stop himself. Bowers’ grin widens, and suddenly he’s not the middle-aged wreck of a man who was almost as pathetic as he was dangerous; suddenly, he’s sixteen again, whipcord-strong and leering like a skull. Blood is still streaming out of his head, but now it soaks into the shoulders of the dark-colored muscle shirt he was wearing that day at the arcade.

“The real question,” Bowers sneers as he stalks closer, “is what the fuck are _you_ doing here, Tozier?”

There’s a flinch down in Richie’s bones, the need to _run, get the fuck out of here_ inscribed on some deep instinctive part of himself. He glances back, and he suddenly thinks he can just make out the mouth of the tunnel he came out of. He could run. There’s nothing keeping him here, not really. Even if Bowers tried something, he’s not—

He’s not fucking thirteen anymore.

Bowers has stopped halfway up the beach, staring at him. He looks—small, all of a sudden. Some of that is just the angle of the slope, but some of it is the fact that Richie probably has a good two or three inches of height on him now. He takes a deep breath, and some of that fluttery panic settles.

He’s not thirteen. He’s faced down much scarier shit than one teenaged psychopath with a bad mullet. He’s here for a reason, and he’s not turning back now.

“So, what,” he says, and finds that his voice comes out almost steady. “Do I have to fight you or something? Are you, like, the final boss? Can’t be, right? You’re more of a miniboss. Some pain in the ass little douchebag who’s just there to get in the way. Just like you were the last two times around. Mike kicked your ass, and Eddie kicked your ass, and I killed you, and now you’re stuck down here like some kind of fucking guard dog.”

Bowers’ lip curls into a sneer, but he doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move forward.

“Am I right? I’m right, aren’t I?” Richie starts down the slope, the beam of the flashlight bouncing as he walks. A flash of it skitters across Bowers’ face and for a moment Richie thinks he can see the shape of his skull grinning underneath his skin. His gorge rises, but he swallows it back. “So, what now?”

He thinks he knows. _Guard dog_ isn’t quite right, but it isn’t far off, either.

 _It’s like a story_ , Bill’s voice echoes in his head, and he’s pretty sure he knows how this story goes. The dark water, the raft. Bowers, who’s done plenty of sneering but hasn’t actually made a move to _do_ anything to Richie. Like he can’t. Like there’s a set of rules he needs to follow, whether he likes it or not. Bowers might really be Bowers, but right now he’s also something else: a psychopomp, the ferryman of the dead. And, hopefully, the one sad asshole who’s trying to jailbreak Hell.

Hopefully. If he’s right about how this works. If he’s wrong, he’s probably going to get gutted by his undead childhood bully, which would be a pretty sad fuckin’ end to all of this.

Richie switches the flashlight to his other hand to dig in his pocket, coming back up with one of Ben’s coins. It’s warm in his hand; warmer than can be accounted for by sitting in his pocket all this time. He sees Bowers’ eyes track it and finds himself grinning, hard and mean.

“Remember how you and your little shithead gang used to hang out in the hallway outside the cafeteria and kick our asses if we didn’t empty our pockets? You really cleaned up for a while there. Good times, right?”

When he was a kid, he had a brief phase when he wanted to be a stage magician. Like most of his childhood passions, it lasted just long enough for him to get distracted by something else. He can’t really remember any of his good tricks now, but he remembers how to flip a coin across the backs of his knuckles. He does it now with the first of the silver dollars, feeling the metal get hotter as it moves. It’s flashy and ridiculous and worth it, completely worth it, for the way Bowers glares at him, rocking forward with his muscles flexing and his mouth sneering like he wants to murder Richie and can’t.

“You’re not even the miniboss, are you?” Richie asks. “You’re just the fucking cab driver. Well, here you go. Here’s my fare.”

He flips the coin into the air, where it catches the light in shining arcs, and then tosses it to Bowers, who snatches it out of the air with one hand, still glaring. There’s a sizzling sound and the smell of burning flesh, but he drops it into his pocket without flinching and stands aside.

“It’s not going to work,” he snarls as Richie moves past him. He’s old again, sagging and slumped in his wet scrubs. His rheumy eyes glitter, and the bloody patch on his clothes gets bigger every time he moves. “Your plan, your little faggot boyfriend, it’s not going to work. The moon still speaks to me, even down here. He tells me things.”

“The moon? You mean the fucking clown? Yeah, we killed him,” Richie says, and steps onto the raft. It sways under his feet. His heart is pounding like he’s been running, or like he’s just been in a fistfight, but he feels strangely unafraid now. It’s still possible, of course, that Bowers might actually be perfectly capable of shoving a switchblade between Richie’s ribs the moment his back is turned, but he doesn’t think that’s going to happen. Not when he already accepted the coin.

 _Thanks a lot, Ben_ , Richie thinks, and lets out a laugh that's breathless, tinged with hysteria. The raft sways again as Bowers steps back onto it and reaches for the pole. He catches Richie watching him and spits contemptuously into the dark water, and Richie finds himself grinning again as they push off from shore.

He turns his back on Bowers, very deliberately, and lets his flashlight shine out into the dark.

For a while, there’s only the sound of water splashing against the bottom of the raft, the rhythmic _thunk_ of the pole as Bowers propels them forward. The water is as still and calm as glass out here; even the ripples from their passage dissipate weirdly fast. The beam of the flashlight doesn’t seem to reach as far, though. There’s still nothing to be seen, but the darkness seems to press in. Like it has weight all of a sudden.

Something white flickers out of the corner of his eye.

It’s gone when he turns his head toward it, but then he sees it again: a small shape moving fast across the surface of the water. It lifts off, spins, lands with a ghostly splash, and becomes a curly-headed boy on a skateboard. He’s slightly transparent and extremely bloody, but worse than that: he’s _familiar._

 _The fun is just beginning._ The fucking kid from the restaurant. He gives Richie a wide-eyed look, then vanishes.

“Jesus,” Richie whispers, shaken.

From the far side of the raft, Bowers cackles unpleasantly. “Land of the dead, Tozier. You’re the one who doesn’t belong here. Go ahead, take a dip. You want to see what the water’s like down here? Want to see if you’ll _float?_ ”

“Just do your fucking job,” Richie snaps at him through numb lips, unable to come up with any snide retort at all. There are more of them now: a girl with a birthmark on her cheek; a toddler of indeterminate gender clutching a teddy-bear. A young man in a pink t-shirt who looks like someone went to town on his face with a sledgehammer meets Richie’s eyes for a long moment before he disappears.

Patrick Hockstetter slinks alongside the raft with an unsettling grin, then sinks into the waves. There’s Betty Ripsom, shoeless and crying silently, and Ed Corcoron with the pale and wary look that Richie remembers him always wearing in school.

Georgie Denbrough stares up at Richie with wet eyes as the raft beaches with a soft grinding of sand. His arm is torn off at the elbow, dripping blood down his yellow raincoat to vanish into the dark water beneath him. Richie stares back at him as more shades converge, then glances back toward Bowers.

Bowers is gone. The pole he was using rests against the side of the raft, which is lifting and dropping slightly with the movement of the water. The shore here is made of the same black, glittering sand. Richie’s flashlight is starting to gutter, but everything it lit up with an eerie glow that must be coming from the ghosts themselves. Georgie is gone now, but there are more of them—lots more. It looks like every single person that died in Derry in the past few hundred years is converging on the shore to check out the new meat, and isn’t that just the most comforting thought.

Everyone, that is, with the notable exception of the one person Richie is actually looking for.

“Fuck this,” Richie mutters, and clambers off of the raft before he can change his mind. Remembering what Bowers said, he’s careful to hop onto the sand without letting his feet touch the water.

As soon as his feet hit dry ground, he’s surrounded by ghosts. Headless boys in short pants and stockings grope blindly at him; a young woman wearing a hoop skirt and missing the bottom half of her jaw peers into his face. He can feel stinging electric prickles where they brush up against him, but the whole thing feels more like a nightmarishly bizarre backstage meet & greet than an attack.

“Fuck, fuck, what the fuck,” he mutters, pressing a hand to his mouth and dry swallowing until he’s sure he can speak without throwing up. “Yeah, thanks a lot, sorry, I’m not really doing autographs—I don’t suppose any of you guys actually talk, huh? I’m looking for someone. Eddie Kaspbrak, he’s about yea high, brown eyes, polo shirt, mouthy as shit—”

A pair of young men with oiled hair and dozens of bullet holes decorating their old-fashioned suits appear arm-in-arm with a blonde woman who'd be pretty if she weren’t missing half of her skull. They sway toward Richie, and he jerks away before the woman can plant a gory, ghostly kiss on his cheek. The three of them burst into silent, uproarious laughter before vanishing like wisps of smoke. Behind them is a man in a scorched Army uniform, his skin melted to black slag. His mouth moves soundlessly before he disappears too.

Is this how Eddie is going to look when Richie finally does find him? Translucent and voiceless with an endlessly bleeding hole still torn through his body?

“Shut up,” Richie murmurs, more to himself than anything. He squeezes his eyes shut, feeling a cold prickle along his side as another one of the shades brushes past him. “Just shut the fuck up. Focus.”

He’s made it this far. He just needs to find Eddie.

“Focus,” he says again, this time in the stern Voice that does turn out to be Big Bill’s after all, and opens his eyes. The shades are fading, starting to drift away like they’ve lost interest in him. Richie makes himself keep walking through the crowd, peering into every ghostly face in the hopes that he’ll see Eddie peering back at him. It’s eerily silent other than the sound of his footsteps on the sand and the soft lap of water on the shore behind him, at least until he becomes aware of some soft percussive sound from above, followed by a breeze that lifts the hair off the back of his neck. Like something massive is coming down out of the darkness overhead.

Vast wings beat the air, scattering the lingering shades. Richie looks up half-expecting to see Mike’s demon bird from the Ironworks, deadly and hungry and spilling orange puff-balls from its tongue. When it settles in front of him, though, it seems smaller than the noise suggested. Less fantastical. It’s spindly and blue-gray with a long neck and a black tuft of feathers rising off the back of its skull. It clacks its long, spear-like beak and tilts its head to peer at him with one eerily intelligent yellow eye.

A great blue heron. There are a few of them in the Barrens, or there used to be, but Richie hasn’t seen one since he was a kid.

“Hey,” he rasps.

The heron stares at him, and Richie stares back. The incipient panic of a moment ago is gone. He’s still afraid, but now it’s a roller-coaster kind of fear, a giddy leap in the pit of his stomach before the descent.

He blinks, and the heron is gone. In its place is a pale, curly-headed boy with a bandage on his face. Richie stumbles back, his breath stuttering before coming out in something that doesn’t quite manage to find the shape of a curse. The boy gives him a long, thoughtful look, then rolls his shoulders and twists into a solemn-faced man who is still terribly, terribly familiar. More so when his mouth turns up into a faint, dry smile.

“Hey, Richie,” Stan Uris says. “It’s been a while.”


	3. People who build their houses in your heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all of your lovely comments!
> 
> There's a (short) playlist for this on Spotify [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5xBOOO4mCSD2hPismYYsu4). I hope you enjoy!

Richie stumbles forward, already reaching out before it occurs to him to worry that Stan might vanish into an insubstantial shadow the moment Richie touches him. He’s warm and solid under Richie's hands, though, and the fond, exasperated, nonverbal grumble that he makes under his breath as he lets himself be hauled into a hug is so familiar that Richie wants to cry.

He presses his cheek into Stan’s curly hair and grips the back of his cardigan with both hands. A bright stinging pain opens up across his palm, like he’s caught it on something sharp, but he doesn’t pull away. “Hey, Stanley Urine. Long time no see.”

Stan snorts against his shoulder. “Nice to see you grew up. You got taller, anyway.”

“Yeah, well, you became an _accountant_ ,” Richie retorts nonsensically. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. Did you pick from a list of the world’s most boring jobs?”

Stan’s shoulders quake under Richie’s hands as he laughs softly, but the smile is fading from his face when he pulls back and peers up into Richie’s face. “It really is good to see you, Rich.”

“We really could have used you back there, Stan the Man,” Richie says quietly. He pulls back a little, and realizes that his stinging palm is actually bleeding, the skin parted along the old scar. There are smears of red on Stan’s frumpy gray cardigan sweater. He stares down at it, flexing his fingers. “Huh.”

“I’m sorry,” Stan sighs. He holds out his own hand; blood is welling from his palm as well, dripping down. It vanishes before it hits the sand. “I wrote you a letter. I guess you probably didn’t get it yet.”

“I haven’t even been back to L.A. yet,” Richie says. “What did it say?”

“You’ll have to read it and see.”

Richie laughs raggedly. “You haven’t changed at all, you know that?”

“Yeah,” Stan says. He’s smiling a little. “Sorry. This cosmological shit is a real pain in the ass, let me tell you. It’s probably a good thing that Bill didn’t know what he was doing, with this.” He holds out his bleeding hand. The blood is dripping _up_ now. Floating.

Stan’s eyes have changed. Like Bev’s did in the deadlights; like Richie’s must have when he was caught in them. They’re not that deadened whitish color, though: instead, they’re filled from lid to lid with a depthless black that’s pricked with flecks of light like the night sky.

“Stan,” Richie whispers.

“It’s okay,” Stan says. He still sounds like himself, but there are _layers_ underneath now, a strange resonance like they’re standing in some vast echoing space. The otherspace, Richie thinks suddenly, but not the terrible blighted light of It. This reminds him of his dreams. That endless blackness and the leviathan being swimming through it.

 _The turtle_ , he thinks, and almost chokes on a laugh. “Are you actually Stan at all?”

Stan’s head tilts slightly. The smile on his face isn’t Stan’s anymore, but it isn’t the clown’s, either. It’s… _serene_ , in a way that lends an ageless cast to Stan’s ordinary forty-year-old face. Even leaving aside the starry blackness of his eyes. “He’s here too. He wanted to speak to you. I’m just borrowing him for a moment.”

“That’s not fucking ominous at all.” He finds that he’s not afraid, though. He should be, probably, but he’s not. “What do you need him for?”

“Easier to talk to you in this form, son. And you share a bond.”

“You mean this,” Richie says, holding out his bleeding hand. It’s not a question. He remembers standing in the Barrens under the hot sun, holding Eddie’s hand on one side and Bill’s on the other, staring at Stanley’s bandaged, wincing face from the far side of the circle.

Stan—or whatever is wearing Stan’s face right now—inclines his head. “Blood oaths are powerful magic. Especially in a place like Derry.”

“We were thirteen. We were _kids_.”

“On a long enough time-scale, every living thing starts to look like a kid. Besides. The important thing is that you believed.”

“That’s what it comes down to, huh? Belief?”

“You already knew that.”

Richie closes his eyes. Remembers Eddie’s body under his hands, still warm. Eddie’s bloody face and still hands, and his own hands digging fists into Eddie’s shirt even as Ben dragged him away. _“He’s not dead, he’s not dead, we can still help him—_ ”

“Yeah, okay, fine,” he says roughly. “Points for style, I guess. Are you gonna tell me how this all works, or do I have to keep making it up as I go along?”

“You already know how this story goes, too.”

“Orpheus in the Underworld, you mean.”

He opens his eyes to see Stan smiling benevolently at him. In that echoing voice, he says, “You can’t carry anything out of the land of the dead, but you can lead the way. Just keep the faith and don’t look back.”

Richie opens his mouth to ask more, but before he can, Stan shakes his head violently. The blackness fades from his eyes, leaving them their ordinary shade of blue. The blood from his hand starts dripping down again, like gravity—or whatever passes for gravity down here—has reasserted its hold on him.

“Stan?” Richie asks carefully. “Is that you in there now?”

“Feels like ringing a fucking gong inside my head,” Stan mutters, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Did you get all that?”

“Isn’t it kind of redundant to hold a seance when you’re already in the land of the dead?” Richie asks, mostly rhetorically. Stan gives him a very dry look, and he says, “Yeah, I think I got it.”

“Good,” Stan says, and holds out his bleeding hand. Richie takes it, pressing their cuts together, and suddenly he’s—

* * *

—somewhere else. The light seems dazzling after the tunnels and the lightless beach, and Richie has to blink several times before his eyes will adjust. It’s not actually that bright, he realizes a moment later; the flickering fluorescent lights overhead illuminate a dim, dusty space with yellowed walls and peeling tile on the floor. There’s a counter at the far end of the room, a door beyond it. The place is empty.

He fucking recognizes it. This is the bus terminal in Bangor, the way it looked the last time he was here in August of 1993. He remembers that. Eddie’s college orientation was a week away and his mom had refused to give him a ride, so Richie offered to drive him before she could lock him in his room to keep him from leaving. Maybe a little bit because there was some sick, greedy part of himself that wanted to do the same thing.

He remembers helping Eddie unload his suitcases from the back of his truck. They were arguing about something. He doesn’t remember what, exactly—not so much clown-related amnesia as simple time. Eddie was snarking at him in a way that was too brittle to be companionable and Richie was snarking back just the same, and whatever the surface part of the argument was, underneath all that was Richie desperately trying to distract himself so he wouldn’t beg Eddie to stay.

They hugged before Eddie boarded his bus, the argument forgotten by then: Eddie’s arms tight around his back, Eddie’s hair in his face, Eddie waving from the bus window before he disappeared out of Richie’s life for twenty-two fucking years.

“What,” Richie says out loud, “the _fuck._ ”

He turns back to look at Stan, but Stan is gone. The glass door opens onto blackness with an obscenely cheerful jingle, and there, finally, is Eddie.

He looks exactly the same as he did that day: seventeen, skinny and sunburnt with his wild dark hair and the ridiculous little wisp of a mustache on his upper lip. The sight of him is like a punch to the gut that sends Richie physically stumbling, but it turns out that doesn’t matter. Eddie’s gaze sweeps past him like he isn’t there at all. His shoulder bumps Richie’s as he passes, or should bump it: instead, there’s just a vague prickling numbness as Eddie moves _through_ him to march up to the counter. He seems to get less solid as he goes. Richie can hear him speaking, but it’s as if from a great distance, and he can’t make out the words. There’s another wavering figure behind the counter now. The long-ago clerk, maybe.

“Eddie,” Richie says out loud, because it is, but—this isn’t real. Or it isn’t the present-day reality, anyway; this is a memory twenty-two years gone.

Still. It’s _Eddie._ A version of him, anyway. There’s got to be some way he can reach him. He takes a step toward Eddie’s younger ghost, when a voice from the door interrupts.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Richie.”

A _familiar_ voice, thin and warbling and gleeful. Richie’s insides turn abruptly to ice.

He turns slowly, feeling his heartbeat in his throat. The door is still open, but instead of the blackness of the underworld beyond it, there’s light: a poisonous orange glow that he remembers only too well, seeping into the cracks of the world and illuminating nothing at all. He blinks, and a figure appears, silhouetted against the glare.

It’s not the clown. Not quite. It looks like a tall man in an old-fashioned pinstripe suit, thinning sandy hair combed to one side, but that smile—

He knows that smile. He’s been seeing it in his nightmares for almost thirty years.

“He isn’t _yours_ , you know. He never was.” The terrible chuckling voice takes on a sing-song quality. “ _You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you_. What is it that you own, Richie? What is it, really?”

“You’re not real,” Richie whispers. “You’re not real, we killed you, you’re not real.”

“What is _real_ down here? Your friend Stan the Man? _Eddie?_ You killed him, too. What makes you think he’ll want to follow you anywhere?”

“I didn’t—” He breaks off. There’s movement out of the corner of his eye. He glances over, and there’s Eddie: not seventeen, not anymore. Now he’s forty, and bloody, slumped against the wall and staring up at Richie with dark, accusatory eyes. His mouth moves soundlessly. Blood bubbles on his lips, spilling down.

 _I’m sorry_ , Richie wants to tell him. _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I love you, I would have done anything to keep you safe._ His mouth can’t make the words. Has never been able to make the words, when it mattered.

The thing that both is and isn’t the clown giggles shrilly. “Oh, but I don’t need to tell you that, do I? You know the rules, Richie. You know how this story has to go.”

Suddenly, it’s much closer, moving with that quick, jerky, marionette gait. There’s a melted-plastic quality to its face, a strange sheen to the skin, a stiffness: as if whatever’s beneath the surface bears no resemblance at all to human flesh and muscle and bone.

“You won’t get to keep him. Even if you bring him back out into the light, he’s never going to belong to you. He’ll leave you behind just like everyone else has left you behind. Because in the end there’s nothing about you that would ever make anyone stay. He thinks you’re just _friends_ , isn’t that funny?

“Do you think he’d have anything to do with you if he knew what you really wanted from him?” Its voice echoes suddenly, hollow and huge and full of screaming laughter, or maybe just screaming. “ _DO YOU, RICHIE?_ ”

The orange glow pulses, spilling in through the open doorway, eating away at the peeling tile like an acid spill. Lighting up all of the metal fixtures in blinding flashes and turning the angles of the furniture strange, shadows pulled in the wrong direction, as if the whole place is starting to slip into some non-Euclidean dimension where the laws of geometry no longer apply. Richie stands stock-still in the middle of it all, frozen as surely as he was frozen down in the cavern, caught and floating in the deadly tractor-beam of It’s gaze.

The clown’s face starts to change, becoming pale and shiny, a bloody grin splitting its jaw in two. Jagged needle teeth and eyes like liquid silver.

 _Oh_ , Richie thinks numbly, petrified by a fear so great that it’s folded over into a strange calm. _Oh, that’s not good._

By the wall, Eddie takes a rattling breath and struggles to sit up. He looks—he looks like he did in the cave, like he’s trying desperately to say something important, choking on his own blood and still trying to talk. His eyes are still on Richie. They don’t seem accusatory now.

His mouth moves, and this time Richie thinks he can make out the words.

_Come here. Richie, come here._

There might be a _fuck_ or two in there too, he doesn’t know. Whatever it is cracks the paralysis that has his limbs frozen, at least enough for him to scramble away from the looming monster in the doorway. He lands hard on his knees on the tile in front of Eddie, and Eddie reaches for him with bloody hands, grasping, clumsy. Richie lets himself be pulled. He can’t care, right now, if this is another illusion. It _looks_ like Eddie: wounded but alive, and fierce, and pulling him in, and if this is how he dies he thinks there are worse ways, in the end.

“Look,” Eddie rasps quietly next to his ear. “Look. At me.”

“What?” Richie asks. His voice comes out jagged, shrill. Terrified, now that he’s moved. Just fucking terrified.

“Look at me,” Eddie says again. There’s a terrible winded bubbling under his voice. Richie remembers that, from the cave under Neibolt. The sound of lungs trying to pull air with a gaping wound through the middle of them. Eddie manages it, though. “ _Look at me._ ”

“I’m looking, I’m looking,” Richie mutters, and he is: Eddie’s bloody face and bloody shirt and his pale, grimy, grasping hands clawing at Richie’s face, pulling him down. Grinding their foreheads together, cold and dirty. Eddie’s hands are _cold_ , so fucking cold.

“He’s not real,” Eddie says, a dry rasp that Richie can feel against his cheek, his mouth. The smell of rot and wet earth. Like the cave, after It died. Before the world came crumbling down around them. “He’s _not_ real, look at me.”

“I’m looking,” Richie says again, and this time the words feel heavy on his tongue.

A sudden stillness, in the space between them. The terrible light from the doorway recedes. Fades. Becomes thin and distant, a pale phosphorescent glow. It’s dark now, where they are, and the floor beneath Richie’s knees feels like rough stone instead of linoleum tile.

Eddie is still so cold under his hands, but he’s still alive. Still moving. Still warmer than the chill air around them. His hands are still holding onto Richie.

“What the fuck, Eds,” Richie murmurs.

Eddie’s hand pats at his cheek; when he speaks this time his voice is stronger. “You’re here.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, and finds that he’s crying all of a sudden, the tears that wouldn’t come for a week rising up to choke him. “Yeah, I’m here. I’m here. I’m sorry, Eddie, I’m so fucking sorry, I just—” He breaks off, tilts his forehead against Eddie’s again. So close that they’re sharing breath. Because Eddie is breathing. He’s _breathing_. “Just tell me you’re real. Please tell me you’re real.”

“I think so,” Eddie murmurs. “I feel real.”

He feels real enough under Richie’s hands: cold and bleeding, but real and close. Close enough to kiss.

As soon as he has that thought, he lets go, shoves his glasses up to swipe a hand over his face. It doesn’t do much good. The tears don’t stop coming; that aching dry place inside him seems suddenly full to brimming. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, Rich, it’s okay.” Eddie pats his cheek again, then cups Richie’s chin, lifting his head until their eyes meet. His voice seems stronger now. “Hey, I gotta tell you something.”

“Yeah, yeah, you fucked my mom, I know,” Richie says, and laughs wetly. “What the fuck, man. I mean, not to judge or anything, but as far as last words go…”

“Shut up, asshole,” Eddie says gently, and Richie does. “That’s not… I—I wanted to tell you that I missed you. That I wished we could—I’m not _you_ , okay, I can’t just—say shit.”

And _that’s_ fucking funny, that’s a laugh and a half. Richie wipes a hand over his face again. Their surroundings don’t quite look like the cavern under Neibolt where he last saw Eddie, but there’s an echo of the place all the same. All jagged rocks and eerie illumination that comes from nowhere at all.

No clown, though. That’s a definite upside.

“I just run my mouth, man, I can’t say fucking anything,” he says, and reaches for Eddie again, sliding a hand behind his shoulders to help him sit. He’s still bleeding. Richie has no fucking idea how to get him out of here. Even if he could carry him, which he can’t. “Hey, can you stand, do you think?”

“Probably not,” Eddie says. “Listen, Rich—”

“What?”

“Just—hey. Do you remember that time in the corn maze?”

Richie lets out a cracked, dry bark of laughter. “McKennett’s, you mean? When I got lost?”

“Yeah. And I found you, and you were crying—”

“Thanks for that,” Richie says. He’s still crying now. His face already feels raw with it. “Yeah, I remember. Why?”

“I don’t think I can find the way out this time. I’m not sure… I think I died, Richie. Did I die?”

“No,” Richie says immediately. “No, man, you got hurt, but you’re gonna be fine, I’m gonna get you out of here, I promise. I _promise._ ”

“You’re such a fucking liar,” Eddie says, achingly fond.

Richie drops his forehead back against Eddie’s. “God, fuck you. Fine. Maybe you did die, maybe we left you behind, but I came back, okay, and I _am_ going to get you out of here. You got it?”

“I got it,” Eddie says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Eddie’s hands are cupping his cheeks, pulling him close. His breath hits Richie’s cheek. His fingers dig in, finding the edges of bone, bruising. “Hey, come here.”

“I’m right here,” Richie breathes.

“Good,” Eddie says, and kisses him.

It’s a dry brush of lips at first. Richie is too stunned to make it anything else, but then Eddie’s hand curves around to the back of his neck, holding him close, and they’re tilting together, moving together, turning it into something sweet and _real_. An actual kiss, no plausible deniability about it. Eddie’s fingers tangle in the hair at his nape in a way that’s actually kind of painful, and Richie couldn’t fucking care less. He’d stay here forever, with Eddie’s mouth pressed to his and Eddie’s tongue slipping tentatively against the seam of his lips.

Eddie doesn’t break the kiss, but it changes all the same. Warm skin gives way to a buzzing coolness. A numbness. The warm hand on the nape of Richie’s neck becomes a prickle of cold.

Richie is the one who pulls back, his stomach dropping. Eddie is— _fading_. Becoming translucent like the ghosts on the shore, and the cavern is fading around them, the jagged spikes of rock smoothing out into a featureless stretch of black sand.

Water moves in the distance. Waves on the shore.

“Richie?” Eddie asks. He sounds distant, faintly echoing like he’s speaking from the far end of a long hallway. His eyes are huge and dark with fear.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Richie says quickly. He’s not sure how much time he has. “Just follow me, Eds. Follow me, okay? It’s my turn to get us out.”

Eddie’s mouth moves, but no sound comes out. He nods instead, and Richie cups his cheek with his still-bleeding palm and kisses him quickly on the mouth again. It’s nothing like a kiss at all this time; electricity buzzes faintly against his mouth and hand, and then there’s nothing.

 _Game on, asshole_ , Richie thinks, and stands. He doesn’t try to help Eddie up, because he doesn’t want to feel his hands slip through Eddie like he isn’t there at all. He can’t let himself think that.

He turns on his heel and starts down toward the water without a backward glance.

* * *

He’s expecting Bowers to be waiting by the raft again, is braced for it, but instead there’s a tall blue heron standing calmly in the shallows. Richie stops so quickly that he almost expects Eddie to run into his back. Maybe he does; it’s not like he’d be able to feel it.

“Hey, Stanley,” he says quietly.

The heron tilts its head at him, then lifts its long legs to pick its way delicately up the bank toward him. Richie expects—or maybe hopes—that it’ll shift into Stan’s shape again, but it doesn’t. The long, expectant look it gives him is pure Stanley Uris, though.

“Okay, okay,” Richie says. There are more tears coming now. He just can’t seem to stop fucking leaking now that he’s started, but he doesn’t bother to wipe them away this time. Instead, he digs in his pocket and pulls out the remaining two coins. One for him; one for Eddie. He holds them out, and the heron ducks its head to pluck them delicately out of his hand.

Then it starts to fade, too, becoming wispy and translucent. Richie blinks and thinks that he catches just a glimpse of Stan’s solemn adult face before the heron lifts off in a flurry of insubstantial wings. Richie lets out a long sigh, and steps onto the raft. He crosses to the far side, where the pole is still where Bowers left it. The raft rocks beneath his feet, then steadies; there’s no sign that anyone else has climbed on behind him.

 _Keep the faith and don’t look back_ , the turtle said to him in Stan’s voice.

“Easier fucking said than done,” Richie mutters now, squeezing his eyes shut. After a moment, he pulls his glasses off and slips them into his pocket, rendering the dark world blurry when he opens his eyes again. Something shines at his feet, and he stoops to peer at it.

It’s the first of Ben’s coins, the one he paid Bowers with earlier. There’s a perfect circle of charred wood beneath it, but it’s cool to the touch when he picks it up. He turns it over in his hand, studying the way it catches the light. Blood smears on the surface from the cut on his palm.

He’s already paid his passage back, and Eddie’s. But there’s one more person down here bound to him by blood and belief. One more person, maybe, that he can save.

 _You know the rules, Richie, and that’s not how the story goes_ , whispers Pennywise in the back of his head.

“Yeah, well, fuck the rules,” Richie says. “And fuck you, too, you crusty undead sewer clown.”

He flips the bloody coin over, then tosses it straight up into the darkness above him. Imagines something with wings—Stanley, in the shape of one of his beloved birds—swooping down to catch it in its beak. _Believes_ , as hard as he can.

“There you go, Stan the Man,” Richie says. “Catch yourself a ride out of here, okay?”

Then he reaches for the pole and shoves the raft away from the shore without looking back.

The strain of propelling the raft along makes a good distraction, at least for a while. The water never gets so deep that he can’t catch the bottom; he could probably wade across, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s pretty sure that touching the black water is a one-way ticket back to the land of the dead. It’s quiet other than the splash of water against the raft, the sound of his own breathing. An ache settles into his shoulders, then reaches down his spine. He has no idea how far he has to go, and no idea how far he’s gone; more than once, he has to squash an automatic impulse to glance back and see how distant the shore has gotten. None of the shades follow him out. It’s just blackness for as far as he can see. 

A horrible thought occurs to him: with no landmarks, he could easily be going in circles, spinning slowly out in the endless black water, never to reach the far shore. Even if he had Eddie’s borderline-supernatural sense of direction, there’s nothing down here for him to navigate by.

He keeps going anyway. His hands are starting to cramp, his palms hot and sore, a blister forming on the base of his right thumb where the weight of his grip sits, and he doesn’t dare let go of the pole even to flex his fingers; he’s gripped by the certainty that if he does he’ll drop it and they really _will_ be stuck out here.

Eventually, though, he hears the distant rhythmic crash of waves upon the shore. He shoves off again, letting the raft ride the tide inward until it beaches loosely on the sand.

Finally, gratefully, he lets the pole go. It falls in the water with a splash and vanishes beneath the surface as Richie hops clumsily onto the shore. There’s another splash in the water behind him. He doesn’t look back.

“Okay, kids, lets get this shitshow on the road,” he says, and starts walking.

Darkness closes around him as he gets farther from the water. His flashlight is still in the side pocket of his backpack, but when he turns it on the beam of light is worryingly dim. He lifts it higher, illuminating as far ahead of him as he can.

“Could have used one of your dumb fucking headlamps, dude,” he says out loud, and makes a face when there’s no response. None that he can hear, anyway. He comforts himself with the mental image of Eddie ranting furiously and silently at his back. “Yeah, I should have packed spare batteries. I’m a dumbass, okay? If I was any good at advance planning, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.”

The thin light catches on something: a shape looming in the distance like the maw of some great beast. A cracked circle of concrete jutting out of the darkness. The sewer pipe.

He doesn’t remember having to climb down, but the mouth of the pipe sits high enough that he has to stash his flashlight in his backpack again to haul himself up, dragging his shins painfully against the sharp edge. When he stands up and turns the flashlight back on, blood is leaking through the front of his jeans below the knee.

“Fucking _ow_ ,” he mutters, bracing himself on the cracked, curving wall to straighten up. It’s just tall enough for him to stand here, but he can see the way it narrows up ahead and his aching shoulders twinge at the prospect of hunching over to fit through.

“You’re lucky you’re so short, Eds. _Five-nine,_ my ass. Maybe with lifts in your shoes.”

He imagines Eddie doing his karate-chopping gesture behind him, all thunderous offended eyebrows, and smiles a little as he starts forward into the darkness.

It’s slow going. His shoulders start to knot early on from walking hunched over, and the gentle upward slope of the pipe quickly proves to be hell on his knees. For a while, he doesn’t have to worry about whether or not he’s going the right way; there only _is_ one way to go. The benefit of the cramped quarters is that he couldn’t really turn around to look behind him even if he wanted to.

He does want to. He really fucking does. Patience and impulse control have never really been his strong points, but the upside of spending his entire adult life firmly wedged in the closet is that he’s got plenty of practice with _not looking_.

He remembers swimming with Eddie at the quarry when they were teenagers, gripped by a sickening combination of confused lust and blind terror every time Eddie shucked off his clothes to jump in. Digging bruises in his own skin to keep from staring. He’s always wanted to look at Eddie, but he learned to stop himself a long time ago. It’s probably not all that psychologically healthy, but it’s useful right now.

He’s not letting himself think about the fact that Eddie kissed him back there, or what that might mean. He’s not letting himself think about anything. He’s just—focusing on moving forward. One foot in front of the other.

The first fork he comes to is an easy choice: up or down, so he picks the right-hand one and keeps going up. The walls are grimy, but there’s not enough accumulated dirt on the floor to show his footprints from coming down here.

“If I was smart, I would have made a breadcrumb trail. Or, I don’t know, what did Hansel and Gretel use the first time? Pebbles? Told ya, Eds, no advance planning skills at all. I’d be a risk analyst’s nightmare, right?”

No response. Richie rubs a hand over his face, briefly touches the glasses still tucked in his pocket, and keeps going. The faint tugging that was guiding him on his way down seems to have abandoned him; for a while, he manages by choosing whatever fork seems to be going in an upward direction. The dusty, lifeless dryness has given way again to the smell of damp rot and standing water, which reeks but does seem to indicate that he’s nearing the surface. Of course, as soon as he has that thought, he comes upon a split in the tunnel that seems perfectly even in both directions.

“Great,” Richie says. “Any thoughts, Turtle God? How about you, Eds? Wanna give me a nudge, say something—don’t leave me hanging, man, come on. You don’t want to watch me wander around down here until I die of thirst like that poor asshole from Public Works back in the seventies, do you?” No response, of course. He laughs out loud, then cuts himself off when he hears the unhinged edge to it. “Okay, fine, fuck you both. Eeny meeny miny moe—”

His flashlight sputters, then goes out. Richie shakes it, thumbs the switch off, then back on. It gutters for a moment, then goes out again. He smacks it hard against his palm. Nothing.

“Motherfucker,” he sighs, then fumbles his glasses out of his pocket and onto his face, like that’ll help at all. It doesn’t. The blackness is absolute. It seems to press in on him from every angle, making him strangely aware of the sound of his own breathing, his pulse thudding in his ears. The silence beyond that.

Richie squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again. He reaches back blindly to stow the useless flashlight in the side pocket of his backpack, then stretches out a hand until he can touch the grimy tunnel wall. He can feel clods of earth come loose under his fingers, the faintly oily roughness of sweating concrete. It sends a shudder of revulsion through him that he can’t fully explain.

“Okay,” he says. “Take two. Eeny meeny—”

Something moves in the tunnel, far behind him: a scraping noise that sounds nothing like footsteps at all. It sounds, instead, like something hard being dragged across the concrete. Like a massive chitinous body folding in on itself, spider-like, to fit through the narrow concrete pipe.

The surge of fear is sudden and all-consuming. Richie gropes blindly in the dark for something—anything—to use as a weapon. There’s nothing, not even a stone on the ground, and he’s completely sure that at any moment a claw will come out of the darkness to pin him to the wall and leave him here bleeding out in the dark.

If he dies down here, what happens to Eddie?

His backpack shifts against his shoulders, and he shrugs it off without thinking as another scraping, skittering sound echoes through the tunnel, getting closer. He twists the straps around his hand to make a grip, feeling the weight clank against his upper thigh, and starts to spin, swinging it—

Something crashes into him. A flurry of wings and feathers, large enough to send him staggering, stopping the momentum of his swing before he can fully turn. Richie staggers, slams into the wall, and goes down hard on his battered knees. He swats awkwardly in front of him with his free hand and hits nothing but air.

His heart is pounding, but his head seems clearer, the sudden mindless fear receding.

At least for a moment, before it dawns on him how close he came to fucking up beyond belief. Bile rises in his throat as the backpack slips through his hands; he swallows it back, bracing his palms on the damp concrete floor.

“Jesus,” he whispers, a dry exhalation. “Fuck. What the fuck.”

There’s no response. No monster sounds from behind him, no feathered wings slapping at his face. He drags a hand over his cheeks and is unsurprised to find that he’s crying again.

“Okay,” he says. It doesn’t sound much stronger. His voice is shaking. “Okay. Nice try. Very fucking sneaky. Thank you, Stanley, if that was you. I owe you, man.”

There’s no response to that, either. Richie braces himself heavily on the wall to stand, and takes all of two steps before he trips over something and nearly goes down again. It falls to the floor with a heavy metallic clatter and the soft ticking noise of a wheel spinning aimlessly in thin air. Richie knows even before he reaches down what he’s going to find, and sure enough, there’s the shape of an old Schwinn under his hands, rubber tires cracked and worn bald. He knows for a fact that he didn’t leave the bike this far in the tunnels.

He fumbles for the handlebars, pulling Silver upright. It lists to the right, so that’s the path he takes without letting himself think about it very much.

It’s not exactly easy stumbling forward in the darkness with the heavy bike in his hands, catching at the rough floor and smashing into his already battered legs, but he manages. There are no more forks in the tunnel, and Richie briefly entertains the idea that he’s being led on a wild goose chase—not into the underworld this time, just through the unmapped sewer tunnels that were It’s hunting ground for decades.

Eventually, though, he becomes aware of a dim glow up ahead, visible only because his eyes are adjusted to total blackness. He sees it first in the shine reflecting weakly off of Silver’s battered chrome fixtures, and then a few minutes later the dim ripples of water that’s starting to get deeper now. Soon enough, he’s splashing through ankle-deep sludge, and then he turns around a bend and there, a few hundred yards ahead, is the mouth of the sewer drain. The green stretch of the Barrens beyond it. _Sunlight._

It feels like he’s been down in the dark for an eternity, but when he finally steps out of the pipe, the sun is just starting to sink below the western horizon, turning the whole world golden. The air smells like mud and rot and growing things. The Barrens always seemed so vividly alive compared to the rest of the town, with the dead rot down at the core of it, and they seem so alive now, compared to the black water and the barren sand of the underworld.

A whippoorwill calls somewhere nearby, an eerie evening sound even though the moon is still just a thin sliver where the sky is starting to go pink around the edges. Richie pushes Silver out of the water and lets it fall gently on the soft green bank. Then he sinks down, too, his back to the sewer drain, and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Come on,” he murmurs, and oh, there’s the fear again, twisting coldly up the back of his throat. Silence stretches out behind him. “Come on, Eds, come on, don’t tell me I’ve been talking to myself this whole time. Keep the faith, man, don’t leave me hanging.”

Another bird calls out in the far distance, and then it’s quiet. Richie takes a shuddering breath.

There’s a quiet splash behind him. Then another. It doesn’t sound like a monster this time; it just sounds like footsteps. Scrambling clumsily on the rocks and getting louder faster than they’re getting closer, like someone just turned up the volume knob on a quiet radio.

“...hope you can hear me by now, asshole, or this is going to get real old real fast, let me tell you—”

The footsteps splash around in front of Richie, then stop. He squeezes his eyes shut tighter, hot tears spilling down his cheeks. He’s shaking, his whole body is shaking. Not from the cold, although he realizes suddenly that he’s freezing. Chilled down to his core.

“Richie?” Eddie says.

Richie sobs out a laugh without opening his eyes. “Have you been chewing me out this entire time?”

“Yeah, well, that’s what you get for fucking kissing me and then walking away without an explanation.”

“You kissed me first. Besides, I told you to follow me.”

“That is not an _explanation_ , oh my god.” He can hear the flat of Eddie’s hand hitting his other palm, and it makes him laugh again, fresh tears spilling down his cheeks. Eddie takes an audible breath, then says, much softer, “Rich, are you _crying_?”

“No,” Richie says thickly, without opening his eyes.

“Yeah, what’s this, then?” A warm thumb swipes over his cheek, dragging moisture. “Hey, come on. Look at me.”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can.”

“I _can’t_ ,” Richie says. He grips his own knees with both hands, feels the still-bleeding cut on his palm twinge. “What if I look at you and then you disappear? I don’t think I can get back down there again. I think the way is shut, man. It’s shut, that’s it, no more do-overs.”

He’s not really making any sense, he knows. Eddie makes a quiet, frustrated-sounding huffing noise, then mutters, _fuck,_ under his breath. Then, with an audibly steadying breath, “Okay, look, I’m not really clear on what the fuck just happened, I feel like I have the world’s worst hangover and I’m pretty sure I was literally _dead_ for a little while there, but I’m here, okay, I’m not going anywhere, I just—” he breaks off again, then says, “ _fuck_ it,” sounding very annoyed, cups Richie’s face in his hands, and kisses him firmly on the mouth.

There’s nothing soft about it this time. It’s bruising and forceful, possibly the most _irritated_ kiss Richie has ever gotten in his life, and that makes him laugh raggedly into Eddie’s mouth. He feels the answering huff of Eddie’s laughter against his lips as they break apart, and he finally opens his eyes.

Eddie’s silhouette swims blurrily before him, wavering against the rose-gold sky, and Richie thinks for a moment that he’s about to vanish right there. And then he blinks, and the tears fall. His vision clears, and it’s just Eddie, grimy and fierce in his ridiculous polo shirt, which is torn open in the front to show smooth undamaged skin beneath.

The cut on his cheek has faded to a thin white line. His palm is bleeding, though; it leaves smears on Richie’s cheek as he pulls back to sit on his heels.

“Okay?” he says, brows drawn together seriously, his narrow mouth pursed. Richie wants to kiss him again, but he’s pretty sure he’s crying too hard to do it properly.

He hauls Eddie into a hug instead, and Eddie huffs, sounding fond and annoyed, and settles easily into his arms. Richie buries his face into his wet and smelly hair for a long moment, his whole body shaking with sobs while Eddie smooths a hand up and down his back, and when he finally manages to open his eyes there’s a blue heron standing in the shallows ten feet away, looking at him.

“Oh,” Richie says softly, like the word has been punched out of him.

Eddie lifts his head to look too. Richie can’t tell what he’s seeing, but his eyes widen like it’s something more than a relatively common waterfowl. “Wait, is that—?”

The bird ducks its head down in the water. Instead of a fish, it comes back up with a shining silver coin in its beak. Then, with a wild flurry of wings, it lifts off into the darkening sky, heading south.

 _Heading for Georgia_ , Richie thinks, and there’s a wild kind of laughter bubbling in his throat that he manages to swallow down. _We need to give Patty a call._

Later. He doesn’t even have her number, or have any idea what to tell her. Stan’s got to find his own way back, but he’ll get there in the end. Richie tucks his face into Eddie’s shoulder and breathes in deep. He reeks, but it’s worth it.

Soon enough, they’ll need to move. Soon enough, they’ll need to climb up the bank, and back into town, and tell the rest of the Losers. Start making phone calls; start the work of re-integrating Eddie into the land of the living. Soon enough, Richie will ask about those kisses, and what they meant.

For now, they just sit there on the bank in silence, grimy and bloody and _alive._ After a while, Eddie shifts against him, pulling back enough to peer up into Richie’s face.

“Rich,” he says seriously. “You have a shitload of explaining to do.”

Richie drops his head back down into the curve of Eddie’s shoulder and starts laughing, and if it comes out sounding like he’s crying, that’s probably okay. “You have _no_ idea.”

“So start talking,” Eddie says, smiling, and Richie does.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also glorious_spoon on [Tumblr](https://glorious-spoon.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/glorious_spoon) if you want to come say hi! I'd love to make more friends in this fandom!


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